Friday, January 5, 2018

The Impending Curtailment of Conventional Oil and the Total Resource Curtailment

In a previous post titled "The Soft Belly of the Oil Industry", I mentioning the impending unlocking of numerous negative feedbacks affecting the oil industry. I argued that the gradual increase of production costs, the need of reducing emissions, the weakened demand created by the electrification of transport, and more were going to take the industry on a ride along the "Seneca Cliff." Here, Geoffrey Chia goes beyond that, arguing that the negative feedbacks generated by a collapsing oil industry will affect the whole economic system. It may be pessimistic as an interpretation, but it is a perfectly possible chain of events.

Why the impending curtailment of Conventional Oil will lead to Total Energy curtailment and Total Resource curtailment

by Geoffrey Chia, January 2018

Outside of Medicine I am an expert in nothing*. In depletion matters I defer to the resource and energy experts such as Professor Ugo Bardi and Alice Friedemann who have conducted painstaking research and performed exhaustive quantitative analyses to arrive at robust conclusions. My main use, if I have any use at all, is to transmit important concepts from the experts to the general public in a qualitative manner, sometimes using my own original visual metaphors and bad jokes, which may hopefully facilitate better understanding by the lay audience. I also tend to view these issues through a medical lens in terms of diagnosis, prognosis and management planning, my aims being to prevent or minimise human morbidity (suffering) and mortality (premature death). Unfortunately due to gross overshoot, humanity are now well past any hope of cure and we are now into the phase of palliative care of a terminally ill industrial civilisation.

I have written and talked much about the imminent catastrophic curtailment of net conventional oil and why unconventional oils are a fraudulent mirage. We will soon tumble down a steep "net oil cliff". Alice Friedemann has done a superb job explaining why curtailment of just one petroleum fraction, diesel, will lead to Total Energy curtailment. Without the services provided by diesel powered vehicles and machinery, coal and natural gas fired electricity generators will be starved of fuel, nuclear power plants will fail and even renewable energy grids will ultimately fail for lack of maintenance. Conventional Oil cliff = Total Energy cliff.

Petroleum curtailment will also lead to Total Resource curtailment. Prof Bardi has written volumes about resource depletion and the Seneca cliff. Industrial agriculture will collapse in the absence of petroleum powered machines to till and sow the land, to apply (fossil fuel derived) fertiliser and pesticides, pump irrigation water, harvest the crops and to process and distribute the products.

The extraction, production and distribution of mineral resources will also collapse with petroleum curtailment. Below (in green italics) is my take on the economic relationship between the two. The main message I wanted to confer from that snippet was that "market price" cannot be used as an index of the abundance or scarcity of a commodity. The contemporary price of a commodity is highly dependent on whether conventional oil also happens to be abundant at that time (among many other factors, including supply vs demand and market distortions). Minerals which are depleting can still be cheap if conventional oil is plentiful, as was the case in the 1990s. If however both the minerals and conventional oil are depleting, which they are now, mineral production will eventually inevitably tumble down a Seneca cliff.

If all the critical outputs which support industrial societies are scheduled to tumble down their respective Seneca cliffs, if the collapse of global industrial civilisation is imminent and inevitable, what can sapient people do to mitigate against future suffering and premature death?

Seek out trustworthy like minded folks and set up your off-grid permaculture community in a rural climate resilient location.

On a slight tangent, let us briefly mention the famous bet in 1980 between the environmentalist Paul Ehrlich and economist Julian Simon regarding the future prices of five selected minerals. After ten years it was found that all the prices had fallen, hence Simon was declared "winner" and economists around the world trumpeted their triumph over the scientists. Ehrlich's error was to make the bet on the basis of price, which as we mentioned is a rubbery variable prone to all sorts of fluctuations, distortions and manipulations. The point Ehrlich wanted to make was that as time goes by, it becomes progressively more difficult for us to harvest, process and deliver the same amount of product (e.g. metal ingots). This is because we would have previously harvested all the "low hanging fruit", the easy pickings, ab initio. We always transition from initially easily scooping up high concentration ores to eventually scrounging the depths for low grade dregs. If Ehrlich had bet that the ENERGY costs of delivering the same amount of product would be higher after ten years (actually a fifteen or twenty year bet would have been preferable), he would have made a better wager. This is an example of how even the smartest of scientists can run into trouble when trying to extrapolate the future on the basis of that most unreliable of variables, price.

The situation is more complicated however. Just like petroleum, minerals go through a phase of rising extraction, a peak of extraction then terminal decline. Even if extraction of a particular ore is entering terminal decline, if that time period coincides with increasing energy availability (as was the case around 1990 with abundant petroleum available pre Peak Oil), then even though ore extraction and processing require more energy, the product may be cheaper due to energy being cheap at the time.

On the other hand, was Simon's victory a result of greater wisdom or intelligence with regard to how prices work? Actually, no, it was just dumb luck, as was explained in David Murphy's 2011 post in TOD: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7343

Moral of this story? Making judgements and predictions based on price is prone to all sorts of pitfalls.

* Inside of a dog it is too dark to read – famous Marxist quote (Groucho, not Karl)

Here is an honest discussion (unlike most economic discourses which are dishonest) in 2015 between top US economists and ivy league professors Joseph Stiglitz (originally trained in Physics) and Robert Reich (originally trained in Law) who both served in the Clinton administration and who both decried Obama's unconditional bailout of the investment banks during the financial crisis of 2008/9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3aJxy9tA-w

They explain that bonus payments to US corporate executives have nothing to do with performance but have everything to do with the share price of their companies. This represents a huge perverse incentive for those executives to prop up the share prices of their companies by any means possible.

To me, this explains much of the behaviour of the conventional oil companies over the past decade or so, which have included:

Exaggerated reporting of their existing reserves and hyped up fabrication of future oil "yet to be found" and oil fields "yet to be developed". http://www.doomsteaddiner.net/blog/2016/12/05/tumbling-down-the-net-hubbert-cliff/ This is easily done by paying prostitute "research institutes" such as CERA to give the oil companies the figures they want, much in the same way that the corrupt bankers paid prostitutes such as Standard and Poor's to give the subprime mortgage bundles AAA ratings.

Mergers of oil companies into ever bigger amalgamations, a swathe of which have been happening in recent years

Quiet buyback of their own shares to create artificial demand for their shares in the stockmarket and hence keep their share price artificially propped up. Robert Reich described this as blatant insider trading. This behaviour has been particularly exhibited by the largest dinosaur of them all, Exxon Mobil. If it was true there is still plenty of conventional oil to be found, they would be using their capital to find and develop those future oil fields instead of buying back their own shares. The reality is that over more than a decade, their massive exploratory expenditures have yielded only a tiny trickle of conventional oil. The fact is that they have now essentially given up the quest for any more conventional oil and are now engaged in monumental economic fraud to deceive the public that their terminally ill companies, now on artificial ventilatory life support, still have some breath in them.

9 comments:

>Seek out trustworthy like minded folks and set up your off-grid permaculture community in a rural climate resilient location.

This is what my parter and I have done, started 8yrs ago, in the Northern Rivers area of a rural NSW here in Australia. Doesn't matter if said collpase is delayed as I am enjoying the process immensly, something incredibly satisfying about it all and not being part of the problem causing this mess also feels satisfying, not over consuming and over emitting. Dr Chia is welcome to join if things go bad very quickly :)

It is by now obvious that social elite will not react to the facts offered to them by the honest part of scientific community. Therefore, the only thing possible is to focus on individuals, to offer them some kind of direction how to prepare for the hard times ahead of us. First thing is to calculate basic energy and food needs of an individual or family, the bare minimum. Than, depending on conditions where they live, a plan should be made which contemporary technologies can be bought right now to help us in the future.

I am waiting and have been waiting for some 15 years since serious discussion of the Hubbert Peak and the Olduvai Cliff first began. I want the real decline to happen sooner rather than later - this old planet can't take much more of human destructiveness.

The problem that was raised in the 1970s and has been ignored for the last 40 years is human population growth. It is not going to end well, I'm afraid.

Quercus

P.S. I'm a short term optimist (every day is fine), but a long term pessimist. If you have white hair, be glad you lived when you did.

Fiveteen years, serious discussion did indeed begin about that time as did more serious disinformation efforts which were and are far better funded.

Awareness has been a causality of the war on terror. Seemingly innocent statements like 'I want the real decline to happen sooner rather than later' are perceived by our invisible Internet police as the mutterings of a potential terrorist. Steps are taken. Most of which nobody is ever aware of.

Search engine algorithms are silent and unseen but available to the highest bidder. The end result is the message dies.

Rabid defense of the Status Quo, has been our enemy and none of their resources are depleting. They have our taxes so we deplete and die before they do. I wish I had better news.

Everybody thinks we are free but nobody is. Messengers don't have to be shot in our digital world. Messengers can now be silently harassed and nullified into irrelevance in total digital isolation. Simple changes in the emphasis of communication flow turns the tide. A tide which now surges around Seneca's cliffs.

Anonymous - Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Nigeria and few more nations are already taken now off of oil in their daily consumption.See the videos below. One really should be careful what he wishes for!Peak Oil and its musical chairs game are not a joke, they are real!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe9qS0QKFSUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QneVmfFlt8Qhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp4YV5WJysw

We live on colliding impossible planets, that only for us, so many benefits bring,Planet Resource of infinite supplies, of cheapest everything.Planet Economy, of infinite growth, of people, consumption, and well-being.Planet Alive, of all life that came before us, never mind it is fast disappearing.Planet Away, our global chemical factorys waste depository.Planet Forgiveness, we can do anything, without proper need to be sorry.Planet Cool, where no matter how much greenhouse gas, we don't need to worry.Some of us may admit we have some big problems today, but our leaders live on Planet Denial where one can say,We also live, on Planet Hubris, where everything is All Okay, and science and technology can fix, if you can afford to pay,Complexity and physical reality has irresistible sway, so move to Planet Religion, where all you can do is pray.

The majority believe that making a diesel engine will require less energy than the total energy it will ever produce throughout its useful life. All energy-generating devices, too. This belief has now been challenged: Energy expended in building a hydro dam, for example, will exceed all the energy its turbines will ever generate, unless kept maintained, pouring more energy in them keeping them running. This is universal applicable to everything, from a pv solar panel to power plant, the newly thesis claims!https://the-fifth-law.com/pages/press-release

Likely, this is the problem that "The Tragedy of the Commons" and many others have talked on talking about, but not attributing it to a standard law of thermodynamics, yet!

Ugo Bardi's blog

This blog deals with the future of humankind in view of such things as the overexploitation of natural resourecs and the effects of global warming. It is a bit catastrophistic, I know, but, after all, the ancient prophetess, Cassandra (above in a painting by Evelyn de Morgan) turned out to have been right!

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Listen! for no more the presage of my soul, Bride-like, shall peer from its secluding veil; But as the morning wind blows clear the east,More bright shall blow the wind of prophecy,And I will speak, but in dark speech no more.(Aeschylus, Agamemnon)

The Seneca Effect

The Seneca Effect: is this what our future looks like?

Chimeras: another blog by UB

Another blog by Ugo Bardi; it is dedicated to art, myths, literature, and history with a special attention to ancient monsters and deities.

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I try to publish at least a post every week, typically on Mondays, but additional posts often appear on different days. Comments are moderated: no insults, no hate, no trolls. You may reproduce my posts as you like, citing the source is appreciated!

About the author

Ugo Bardi teaches physical chemistry at the University of Florence, in Italy. He is interested in resource depletion, system dynamics modeling, climate science and renewable energy. Contact: ugo.bardi(whirlything)unifi.it